


Strange Bedfellows

by Raccoonfg



Category: Zootopia (2016)
Genre: Beds, Comedy, Dolls, Festivals, Gen, Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-10
Updated: 2018-05-10
Packaged: 2019-05-04 23:14:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14603835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raccoonfg/pseuds/Raccoonfg
Summary: With Judy away at the annual Carrot Festival and Nick in need of a place to crash, he spends the night in her empty apartment. But is it really as empty as he thinks?





	Strange Bedfellows

**Author's Note:**

> The following short story was written for /ztg/'s Thematic Thursday event; Festivals, Conventions, and Expos (5/10/18)

“Really appreciate you letting me crash at your place, Carrots. My landlord pretty much dropped this whole fumigation thing on my lap out of nowhere, and there is no way in heck that I’m spending a weekend on Finnick’s mattress. Believe me, there’s no worse way of starting your morning than falling out of the back of a van.”

“Well, I’m just happy I can help. Besides, it’s not like I’m using it while I’m out here in Bunnyburrow.”

“True, true,” Nick replied, nodding to himself as he cradled his cellphone close to his ear. “So, uh, how’s things going at the pumpkin festival?”

“Carrot festival, Nick,” Judy quickly corrected. “The pumpkin festival in October.”

“I thought the carrot festival was last month…”

“W~hat?! Nooo,” laughed Judy. “Last month was the lettuce festival. Same month as the hay races and the walnut toss.”

“Huh… Are you guys sure you have enough annual tourist trap hoe-downs?”

“Ugh. We don’t have ‘hoe-downs’, Nick. Not since the corn jamboree’s butter fire of eighty-seven. Although… I guess the barley bash counts, but it’s only on leap years…”

“You have such a rich and fulfilling culture, Carrots,” Nick deadpanned as he heavily dropped down on the edge of Judy’s bed, causing the wooden frame to creak under his weight.

As his paw smoothed out the creases and wrinkles in the sheets, he spotted out of the corner of his eye a row of small, glassy-eyed onlookers silently staring at him as they sat motionlessly against the headboard.

Rabbit dolls.

He could never understand mammals who owned dolls that were the same species as themselves. It just seemed so boring. You could pick almost any sort of toy you wanted as a kit - like a stuffed octopus or a soldier with kung-fu grip - and the best you could come up with was a miniature **you**?

His friend Honey used to say something about dolls being a tool to ‘enforce gender roles’, but he mostly tuned that stuff out while he imagined how cool it would have been if someone had made a stuffed octopus with kung-fu grip.

That’s like…

Eight grips.

“Are you sure you’ll be okay for the night? My bed is a bit smaller than yours…”

“Hm?” Nick’s attention returned to the oblong device in his paw. “Yeah, I’ll be fine. I don’t mind letting my feet hang over the end.”

Taking in the full scope of the room, he started to wonder if her apartment wasn’t any bigger than Finnick’s van.

Either way, Judy’s place at least it had a bathroom.

Somewhere.

“Hey, uh, are your neighbors gonna serenade me to sleep?”

“Ha! Nope,” Judy snorted. “They’re on some cruise for the next week. Honestly, I envy you. I never get a night without hearing them through the walls.”

“Well then,” Nick purred while reclining back against the brick wall, “you’ll be back before them, right? Maybe I could stay a bit longer and we could make a little noise through the wall, hm? See how crowded this bed can get…” Entirely for his own amusement, Nick smiled and playfully winked at the velveteen audience that continued to watch him from their pillowed perch.

“Nick,” Judy gasped.

“What? It’s just you and me talking, right?” Suddenly the neutral, unblinking gaze of the dolls felt more accusatory and Nick’s suaveness melted away into worry. “I-I mean, it is just you and me talking, right? Carrots? I’m not on speaker-phone, am I? B-because if I am, I just want to say, Mr. H, that was all just some teasing between fellow officers. Y’know, locker-room banter--”

“You’re fine, Nick,” Judy sighed. “I don’t think I could ever use speakerphone after the last time.”

“How was I supposed to know you were in court? And in my defense, it was a pretty good limerick.”

“I’m going to hang up and pretend that the last couple minutes were dead air.” Her voice came through so unimpressed that he could almost hear her heavy eyelids in her tone. “Sleep tight Nick.”

“You too, Judy,” he replied with a yawn. “You too.”

Tossing his phone aside on the nightstand, Nick absently scratched at the fluff on his neck, soaking in the awkward silence of being alone in someone else’s home. It felt strange and vaguely unsettling; like he was an unseen intruder. A voyeur of none.

And yet…

“Ah~n!”

And yet, he had a long day of desk duty and a good night’s rest exceeded any need to feel ‘at home’.

Hopping off the bed, Nick loosened up his tie and hooked the open loop over the doorknob.

“There,” he nodded. “Like home already.”

He then paced around the small room while unbuttoning his shirt - briefly musing over the irony of a police officer living in a space the size of a jail cell - when he suddenly felt something leave his grasp, followed by the soft and barely audible clatter of plastic.

“Oh, for crying out loud…”

Wobbling at his feet was a single, stray button.

“My favorite shirt, too,” grumbled Nick as he stooped down and picked up the round, black fastener.

Sighing heavily with his shirt hanging half-open, he glared at the button and stomped a short distance to Judy’s nightstand, angrily opening the top drawer to search for a mending kit.

If there was one thing he could count on to find in her place, it was emergency tools like that.

Instead, what he was first greeted with was far from what you would consider a tool.

Much softer.

And frilly.

And patterned.

“Heh. ‘Carrots’ indeed,” Nick chuckled, admiring his lucky find.

However, his basking in the spoils of nether treasures was short-lived, as the creeping feeling of being judged from above inched over him. So he carefully folded his prize back where he found it, knowing that it was probably best to save some surprises for later.

It didn’t take much longer to find a spool of thread and sewing needle among all the other tantalizing underthings, but after failing to thread the eye for the dozenth time, he decided it was probably a better job for the morning when he had a fresher mind.

Dropping the rest of his clothes on the floor, Nick reached out to pull the blanket aside, only to pause as his eyes once again met with Judy’s little stuffed friends.

“What girl her age still sleeps with dolls anyway?”

With a disappointed shake of his head, Nick let go of the sheet, scooped up the entire collection of dollies in his arms and dumped them in one big heap next to his shirt and pants.

“Consider yourselves evicted for the night.”

And with that self-serving quip, Nick indulged in another pronounced yawn before turning off the light and crawling into bed; where he tossed, turned, and squirmed until he managed to find some comfort on the tiny mattress.

 

* * *

 

It was almost pitch black when he abruptly woke up with a tightness on his chest. Too dark to even allow his innate night vision to properly kick in. But sight was his furthest concern at the moment.

No. Puns aside, the firm constriction around his ribs was far more pressing. And all Nick could think at the moment was ‘Crap... This is what my doctor had been warning me about, isn’t it? Damn sleep apnea...’

Doing his best to keep calm, he started to measure out his breathing until he could regain control over his heart and lungs, yet no matter how much he tried, it seemed like it was getting tighter and tighter by the minute, pushing down on him.

The sensation was intense, but it wasn’t until what came next did he really start to panic.

The instinct to lift his arm and give his chest a hardy thumping had kicked in, but when he tried raising it from the mattress, he discovered - to his shock - that it wouldn’t budge!

Neither would the other arm. Or his legs.

It was like every extremity was crudely restrained by some unseen force.

Everything but his head.

Straining to tilt his chin against his collar-bone so he could glean just some shred of what was going on with his body, a hint of moonlight finally focused his eyes and he caught sight of movement in front of him.

Or more exactly, on top of him.

Little dark blobs of shadow crawled back and forth over his prone body, methodically wiggling about in some incomprehensible task.

Seeming to realize he was now aware of their presence, the figures immediately stopped; their silhouettes almost appearing to turn back at him in unison before each one rose up to their full, tiny height, tilting their long, pointy heads in what appeared to be a sinister examination of him.

And from within their diminutive, misshapen ranks, one of them moved quickly towards Nick with an urgent, imperious stride.

Helplessly watching the black specter close in on him, it now dawned on Nick that he was dealing with far worse than medical insomnia.

Far, far worse.

‘Goddamn it. Sleep paralysi--’

Before he could complete that thought, the bedside lamp suddenly clicked on, filling his vision with a dim light, revealing that what now stood right at the tip of his nose was very much real and accusingly pointing at him with its featureless stump of an arm as it bellowed authoritatively in a squeaky voice.

“You are not The Judy!”

“What. The. F--”

“Where is The Judy?!”

Behind it, the others began to angrily hop up and down on Nick’s body, waving their stubby limbs in protest, chanting in a Lilliputian trill as their long ears flopped about.

“The Judy! The Judy!”

Now in full panic mode, Nick’s eyes darted every which way in an attempt to make sense of all of this. His body jerked with fear, still unable to move from his spot, and now he knew exactly why. Criss-crossing all the way from his ankles, right up to his shoulders, was a thin thread that held him down like he had been sown into the mattress itself.

This was impossible.

Insane.

He couldn’t have been awake.

This must have been a dream.

A nightmare.

A flashback from something he tripped on in college.

Anything was better than what was literally staring him in the face with its glaring button eyes.

He had been taken captive by a gang of stuffed rabbits.

“Ouch!”

The sharp swat on his nose was surprisingly painful for something that came from a creature without bones.

‘Oh god,’ Nick thought. ‘Please don’t tell me Judy’s dolls have bones stuffed in them.’

“Not The Judy will pay attention!”

The lead doll huffed as it sternly planted its nubby ‘hands’ on its ‘hips’, looking about as commanding as one can be while wearing a pair of blue felt overalls with a pink heart safety-pinned into the chest.

“You are Not The Judy, and The Judy is not here,” it continued, leaning in close to Nick with its lower face pinched and scrunched into some manner of frown. “Where is The Judy?”

Nick’s mouth silently floundered for a few moments until his brain could manage to summon words again.

“The… Uh… The Judy is… Not here--” The fabric of the rabbit’s brow folded over its eyes in an impatient glare, so Nick cut to the point. “She’s visiting her parents.”

“And Not The Judy?”

“I’m crashing for the night…?”

The other rabbits murmured amongst each other in soft whispers that somehow sounded not too unlike corduroy rubbing together, while the head doll leaned back to listen in before returning his attention to Nick with its arms folded.

“Will not do.”

“I- Ah-” Nick sputtered, giving another half-hearted fight against his bonds. “C’mon guys, I don’t see the big deal. I mean- Okay, so it was rude that I kicked you off the bed like that, but now that I know you’re all alive - for some crazy reason - we can let bygones be bygones and split the bed eighty-twenty.”

Arms still folded, the rabbit solemnly shook its head.

“Seventy-thirty?”

One by one, the other rabbits joined him in wordlessly refusing.

“Okay,” Nick rolled his eyes. “Fifty-fifty. And that’s because we’re practically pals now. It’s like they say, ‘you got a friend in m--’.”

“Will. Not. Do.”

The head rabbit rapped its arm on Nick’s nose, silencing him.

“We are of The Judy,” it continued, waving its arm towards its plushy kin. “We protect The Judy”

It then swept its arm down, gesturing towards the mattress.

“This bed is of The Judy. We protect the bed.”

And then its arm continued its arc, prodding Nick right in the schnozz.

“You are Not The Judy. You do not belong.”

“Alright,” Nick angrily snapped, “I get it. Me Nick. Me not Judy. Me not welcome. So why don’t you - argh - let me free and I’ll be out of your hair- or velcro- or whatever!”

As much as Nick struggled with his renewed vigor, all he succeeded in was chafing and scratching his hide while he growled and gritted his teeth.

Just as soon as it came, the fight slowly began to leave him once more, as he saw that the dolls didn’t seem to be bothered by his outburst. Rather, they simply watched him with a sort of passive indifference; if it was possible for buttons and string to convey such cold apathy.

“We protect more than The Judy,” said the leader. His high pitched voice carried a callous flatness.

“Much more,” one of the other rabbits ominously chimed in; its arms limp by the sides of its picnic blanket dress.

“We protect The Innocence,” yet another stuffed rabbit added from under its plastic sombrero.

“Yes,” two rabbits in matching sailor suits said in unison, “The Innocence.”

“The… Innocence?” Nick asked, chocking with confusion. “I don’t get what you--”

And then it made sense.

“Oh. You heard- And saw- …L-listen guys, I-I was only joking around. I’m really The Ju- Judy’s friend! I would never hurt her- Or her innocence! Honest!”

The dolls began to shamble towards him, tottering forward on their pegged legs as they leered at him with their dead black eyes.

“You don’t want to do this,” he pleaded. “I’m not a bad fox. I’m a cop! I’m actually not all that different from you.”

The mob of moppets halted their advance as the head rabbit held out its arms, barring them behind him.

“Not different?” It chirruped inquisitively. “How?”

“S-she’s a cop,” Nick explained, trembling in the face of a dozen dollies. “A-and I’m a cop. We’re p-partners.”

A bit of the rabbit’s brow jutted up, beckoning him to go on.

“And when you’re a cop, it’s your partner’s job to p-protect you. So I protect her. J-just… Like… You.”

The head rabbit lowered its arms and the all the others behind him began to slowly relax where they stood, bringing some shred of hope to Nick that maybe, just maybe, he was getting through to them.

“Understand…?”

Quietly, the stuffed rabbits started to huddle together, once again whispering with each other in a hush rustling of fabric as their cotton-ball tails bobbed excitedly. The head rabbit lingered a skeptical glance at Nick until he too joined the discussion.

Within moments, the group gave each other a simultaneous nod of approval before breaking ranks, with their leader turning back to Nick and the others darting off the bed.

“We understand,” said the head rabbit.

Nick breathed an immediate sigh of relief. “Oh thank god.”

“We the same.”

“Haha. Yup. So, ah, if your buddies can just hurry up with getting those scissors, you can cut me free and- Ah, there we go!”

Nick was practically beside himself with glee as he saw Sombrero scamper over with a pair of scissors.

“You only want to help protect The Judy.”

“Uh, right. Already established that…”

Soon, Sombrero was joined by Picnic Blanket, holding what Nick recognized as his shirt button.

“So we make mends.”

“Y-you, ah… You mean ‘amends’, right…?”

From the edge of the bed, he could see the Sailor Suits climbing up the blanket, tugging Nick’s shirt along with them, while another rabbit ran past his head, carrying the emergency spool and needle.

“R-right?” Nick gulped, watching wide-eyed as the head rabbit gingerly accepted the sewing tools.

“We protect The Judy. We are of The Judy,” the head rabbit intoned as it effortlessly threaded the eye of the needle with a single fluid motion. “You protect The Judy. You are of The Judy.”

Unable to find the will to scream out, Nick uselessly flapped his mouth in terror as the toys crawled up his body with their vacant, stitched-on faces; dragging the foreboding trinkets behind them.

“We make mends.”

 

* * *

 

With the sharp click of the front lock, Judy swung the door open and stumbled in, shoulders hanging heavily, tugging her luggage behind her.

The visit went well, but the journey back was probably the low-point of her trip.

The train was crowded.

The cab driver had no air conditioning and blared his radio.

And worst of all, she waited for ages at the Savanna Central transit terminal before caving and taking that darned taxi.

“Well,” Judy sighed as she looked around her apartment, “at least Nick didn’t make a complete mess of things.”

But as she completed her surveillance of the room, there was one thing out of place that caught her eye.

“Hm?”

Leaning over her bed, Judy picked up one of the dolls that sat along the headboard and smiled.

“Alright Slick, you get points for the apology gift,” she muttered aloud as she playfully tapped its big, button nose and set it back down with the others.

It didn’t exactly fit with the rest, but that was okay; a rabbit owning nothing but rabbit dolls could get a bit boring. Why not change it up with a little splash of orange in the group?

“Shame, though,” Judy mused to herself. “He went to all that trouble of getting one with a shirt like his, and it’s missing a button.”


End file.
